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French politics after the fall of Sarkozy

A young supporter of the Front de Gauche (Left Front).

By Murray Smith

June 7, 2012 – Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- After long months of
campaigning, the French presidential election came to a close on the evening of
May 6. As predicted, the victor, and therefore seventh president of the Fifth
Republic, was Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande. However, the margin
of victory, at 51.6 per cent to 48.4 per cent, was narrow, and closer than any
of the polls had foreseen.

So France now has a new president and a new
government, presided over by long-time Hollande ally and Socialist Party
stalwart Jean-Marc Ayrault and composed of members of the Socialist Party and
its Green and left radical allies. Of course, this government has necessarily
an interim character, since it does not have a majority in parliament. Whether
it wins one or not will be decided in parliamentary elections to be held in two
rounds on June 10 and 17.

Election campaign

First of all, let us look at the lessons of the
election campaign, which began in earnest last autumn, and moved into top gear
in January. (Although Nicolas Sarkozy only officially launched his campaign in February,
he had in fact, using his status as incumbent, already been campaigning for
months). Hollande and Sarkozy were from the beginning the obvious front runners.
Hollande began the contest with an opinion poll giving him a 39- to 24-point
lead over Sarkozy, but that steadily declined over the following months.
Sarkozy’s biggest problem, which he never succeeded in overcoming, was his
unpopularity among wide layers of society after five years in office. That was
also a permanent advantage for Hollande. But it was never going to be
sufficient.

Hollande had to try and come across as positive, while
on the other hand seeking to avoid making too many firm commitments. When he
launched his program in January he affirmed his “determination to master
finance”. He later designated the world of finance as his “principal
adversary”. Unfortunately, he said pretty much the opposite shortly afterwards to
British journalists. “The
left was in government for 15 years in which we liberalised the economy and
opened up the markets to finance and privatisations. There is no big
fear."

Hollande did however propose a tax on financial transactions,
the restoration of a tax on stock exchange operations abolished by the right wing
in 2008 and the separation of retail and investment banking. He also denounced the
excesses of finance in a general way, and expressed a desire to ban “toxic
financial products” and speculative products”, but without specifying which
ones and how. And he made headlines by promising to raise the top rate of
income tax to 75 per cent. Along with this went a discourse on the importance
of pro-growth policies, something which in the course of the campaign appeared
increasingly in phase with some other European leaders. And when 25 countries
of the EU signed up to the fiscal pact in February, Hollande announced that if
elected he would renegotiate it. He also promised to create more posts in the
public sector, particularly in education, although it was not always clear how
many were new posts and how many replacements for those retiring. On wages he
was quite discreet, eventually conceding under some pressure from the Left
Front that he would make a minimal increase in the minimum wage.

Sarkozy began by trying to maximise the fact that he
was the sitting president, citing his experience in handling the crisis in
2008-09, as against Hollande who has never held public office at national
level. It made some impact, but not enough, hardening his own supporters more
than winning new ones. Hollande, to many people’s surprise, more than held his
own against a very aggressive Sarkozy in the one face-to-face televised debate four
days before the second round.

As the campaign wore on, and particularly between the
two rounds, Sarkozy swung increasingly to the right in search of the far-right National
Front (FN) voters he had won over in 2007 and who, disillusioned, were going
back towards the FN. He stressed issues of law and order, immigration and
attacked the Muslim population, making in particular a huge issue of halal meat.
This was not only denounced by the left, but criticised by some of his own
supporters as alienating the centre. But it was unfortunately effective. In
fact, Sarkozy won more than 40 per cent of FN voters in the second round,
although FN leader Marine Le Pen had announced she was voting blank, as against
about 20 per cent who voted for Hollande. Sarkozy also won more than 40 per
cent of those who had voted for the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou, who had
announced that he was voting for Hollande, whereas Hollande got about 30 per
cent.

In fact it was the big jump in the total left vote -- 45
per cent to the Socialist Party, Greens, Front de Gauche (Left Front) and far left partes -- in the
first round compared to 2007 and the fact that a very large part of it voted
Hollande in the second round that clinched it. There was also a clear class content
to the vote. According to a survey, Hollande won 54 per cent of the votes of
those who manage to survive “with some difficulty” and 62 per cent of those in
“great difficulty”. Compared to 2007, Sarkozy lost support in the last two
categories but actually gained 1 per cent among those who live “quite easily”
and a whopping 16 per cent among those who live “very easily”.

The campaign was not by any means reduced to the duel
between Sarkozy and Hollande. In 2007 the confrontation between Sarkozy and
Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal had been perturbed by Bayrou, who looked
at times as if he might conceivably edge out one of the two main candidates and
get into the second round, and who ended up with 18.6 per cent of the first
round vote. This undoubtedly reflected a significant layer of voters who were
somewhere between Sarkozy and Royal but opted for Bayrou rather than choosing. Bayrou
stood again but ended up with only 9.1 per cent, losing 3.5 million votes. This
time, rather than an undecided centre layer, there was an increasing polarisation
as the election went on. This polarisation was partly expressed in the
opposition between Hollande and Sarkozy, but the two candidates who best
represented it were Jean-Luc Melenchon of the Left Front, who won 11.1 per cent,
and Marine Le Pen of the National Front, who came third with 17.9 per cent. None
of the other candidates got over 3 per cent.

Left Front (Front de Gauche)

Melenchon’s program, of which 400,000 copies were sold,
presented quite clearly and unambiguously an alternative to the left of
Hollande. It was opposed to austerity, against cuts in public spending, for a
repeal of Sarkozy’s pension “reforms” [cuts], against privatisation and for
defence of public services.

It argued for progressive taxation, rising for example
to 100 per cent for incomes above 360,000 euros per annum. It proposed a public
banking pole to provide credit for the productive economy, controls over the
financial sector and a reorientation of the economy towards the production of
useful goods and services.

Melenchon proposed a program for a Sixth Republic,
parliamentary rather than presidential, with democracy extended to the
workplaces. Melenchon, who has some problems confronting the widespread Islamophobia
in France because of his very traditional left republican secularism, had gone
about combating racism and very forcibly defending immigrants and their
contribution to French society. On the international level, the Left Front
called for France to withdraw from NATO.

Melenchon’s success certainly owed a lot to his own
energy and oratorical and communication skills. But there was much more to it
than that. He was a long-time Socialist Party member, a former senator and a figure
on the left of the party. His current, For a Social Republic, played an active
part in the united left campaign against the European Constitutional Treaty in
2005, alongside the Communist Party (PCF), the Revolutionary Communist League
(LCR) and other forces. Melenchon left the Socialist Party in November 2008
with 2000 people and founded the Left Party. At the beginning of 2009, in the
run-up to the European elections, the Left Party joined with the French
Communist Party and a smaller formation, the Unitary Left, which had left the
newly formed New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), to form the Left Front. From an
unpromising start, the Left Front got a creditable result, 6.5 per cent, and
over a million votes. In particular it overtook the NPA, which had been launched
with quite a dynamic behind it after the second presidential electoral success,
nearly 1.5 million votes for the LCR candidate Olivier Besancenot. The NPA had
refused to join the Left Front.

The Left Front’s success was repeated and amplified in
the regional elections of 2010 and the cantonal (local) elections of 2011. As
the Left Front advanced, the NPA was further distanced and increasingly some of
its local and regional sections broke ranks and formed electoral alliances with
the Left Front.

This period from 2009 is important. It enabled the
forces comprising the Left Front, with different histories and different
political cultures, to learn to work together, to build confidence. In the
process they proved wrong the many commentators who predicted that it would
collapse because of internal dissent. The most remarkable result came in June
2011 when, in an internal election, nearly 60 per cent of Communist Party
members voted to endorse Jean-Luc Melenchon as the presidential candidate of
the Left Front, in preference to Andre Chassaigne, a leading and very respected
figure in their own party. Certainly the party leadership had proposed
Melenchon. But even so no one would have predicted such a result a year or two
before.

In fact the figure of Melenchon, particularly the way
he necessarily dominated the presidential campaign, tends to hide the real
relationship of forces within the Left Front. All its components gained from
the election campaign. The Left Party has recruited 3000 and may now have
around 10,000 members; the Unitary Left has less than a thousand. The other
forces that joined the Left Front during the presidential campaign can be
counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands. The Communist Party has around
120,000 members of which 70, 000 are said to be in good standing (in the June
2011 consultation 48,000 members voted). It has recruited 6000 new members in
the course of the election campaign.

Communist Party

The PCF’s engagement in the Left Front appears as the logical
pursuit of an orientation gradually developed over nearly 10 years, which can
be summed up as follows: unity with other left forces on a line of clear demarcation
from the Socialist Party. This orientation was first demonstrated on a national
scale in the 2005 referendum. The PCF had experienced a long period of decline
from the early 1980s on, reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and manifested
a certain disorientation in the 1990s, not helped by its participation in the “plural
left” government of then Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin from 1997-2002.
The party claims, credibly, to have arrested its decline since 2005 and begun
to recruit. The parenthesis of the failure to have a common candidate of the
radical left in 2007 and the disastrous PCF presidential campaign of
Marie-George Buffet that followed has been described by present PCF national
secretary Pierre Laurent as “an accident”.

The decline of the PCF had opened the way for far-left
organisations, especially Lutte Ouvriere and later the LCR, who began to be
successful on the electoral level from 1995 onwards. The culmination of this were
the scores of Besancenot in 2002 and 2007 and the launching of the NPA. It is even
clearer in retrospect that the NPA, in presenting itself as an alternative to
the Left Front rather than joining it, took the road of increasing marginality,
leading to crisis and splits in its own ranks.

Melenchon received nearly 4 million votes in the first
round of the 2012 presidential election. Where did they come from? We can
assume that he took the 700,000 voters who opted for Buffet in 2007, and indeed
the million or so who voted for the Left Front in 2009-2011. Surveys also show
that he took a lot of the million votes that were lost between Besancenot’s
score of 2007 and the 400,000 of NPA candidate Philippe Poutou in 2012. He also
did well among first-time voters. That leaves a lot. Looking at the first-round
score of Hollande, who only gained 770,000 more votes than Royal had in 2007, it
seems likely that Hollande will have picked up votes from those who backed Bayrou
in 2007 and lost votes to Melenchon: so there was a movement of voters from
Bayrou to Hollande and Hollande to Melenchon. This is confirmed by an IFOP
opinion poll that estimated that 30 per cent of Hollande’s first-round voters had
hesitated between him and Melenchon.

This probably explains why Melenchon, who had been regularly
credited in the opinion polls towards the end of the campaign with 14-15 per
cent of the vote (17 per cent in one poll), ended up with just over 11 per
cent. This gap between expectation and reality initially led to some disappointment
by those involved in the campaign. But objectively it was still a very good
result. You have to go back to 1981 to find more than 4 million votes for a
party to the left of the Socialist Party.

National Front

The score of the National Front made a great impact.
Nevertheless, although Marine Le Pen’s vote was considerably greater than the
Left Front’s, the progression is less spectacular. The FN vote was 6.4 million,
17.9 per cent. In percentage terms it is more than the score of her father in
2002 when he spectacularly beat Socialist Party candidate Lionel Jospin and
made it into the second round, but less than the combined scores of Le Pen and
FN dissident BrunoMegret in that
year. However in terms of votes it was a million more. It is generally recognised
that the drop in the FN vote between 2002 and 2007 was due to Sarkozy’s success
in winning over FN voters.

A closer look shows that in 2007 the FN vote held up
in populous areas such as Pas de Calais and Somme, dropping by only around 2
per cent, and fell much more sharply in middle-class areas where voters
defected to Sarkozy in large numbers. In 2012 the FN increased its vote practically
everywhere, although much less markedly in the working-class areas in the
Parisian region, where Le Pen’s vote was systematically below her national
percentage and she was quite often pushed into fourth place by Melenchon.

Limbo

Although the Ayrault government is functioning and
taking some decisions, in an institutional sense France is in limbo. According
to the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the president has considerable
powers if backed by a parliamentary majority. If not, the president’s authority
is much more circumscribed and has to name a government that does have a
majority. This situation, known as “cohabitation”, has already occurred under the
Socialist Party’s President Francois Mitterrand from 1986 to 1988 and again
from 1993 to 1995 and under conservative Jacques Chirac from 1997 to 2002. The
result was conflictual but not a political crisis. But in these previous cases
the political, economic and social situation was much less acute. Now, after
five years of financial and economic upheavals, France -- like her European
neighbours -- is faced with the sovereign debt crisis, the banking crisis and
the crisis of the eurozone.

In a broad sense, on the basis of what Hollande said
in his election campaign and of what he did not say, he was not exactly in line
with the European policy of austerity and structural reforms. This was
commented on very critically by such publications as the Economist and the Financial
Times. The Economist devoted two
major features to the campaign with front-page headlines “France in denial –
Europe’s most frivolous election” and “The rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande”.
The gist was that Hollande (and even, to a lesser extent, Sarkozy…) was not
doing his duty by failing to warn French people of the austerity and
counter-reforms that were coming.

The programs that are propounded, and imposed on the weaker
members, by the European Union-European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund
“Troika” comprise policies of austerity, budget deficit reductions, cutting
public expenditure, labour rights and pension cuts, privatisation. These are
not the policies that Francois Hollande was elected on. According to European
Commission forecasts, France is expected to meet its budget deficit target of
4.5 per cent of GDP in 2012. But whereas Hollande is committed to a target of 3
per cent in 2013, the commission estimates the deficit will be 4.2 per cent.
The 1.2 per cent difference comes to 24 billion euros and if Hollande sticks to
the target he will have to find them somewhere. On pensions, Sarkozy succeeded
in 2010, in the face of massive protests, in raising the retirement age to 62,
pretty modest by current European standards. Hollande promised to partially go
back on this and make it possible for some very limited categories of workers
to retire at 60. On labour reforms he has said practically nothing, except to promise
repeal one of Sarkozy’s last measures in which taxes on employers were reduced
and the tax losses were compensated by a rise in the indirect value-added tax
(VAT) – thus going in the wrong direction according to conventional European capitalist
wisdom.

Hollande has also made no concrete proposals to cut
the public sector and ruled out further privatisation. He proposes to reduce
the budget deficit by 40 per cent with tax raising and 60 per cent spending
cuts, but remains vague about details. On June 6, Hollande’s finance minister,
Pierre Moscovici, reiterated the commitment to cut the budget deficit but
refused to be drawn on details. In reaction to Brussels’ calls for labour
market reforms, deregulation, pension cuts, Moscovici – who is no leftist –
replied: “We will make structural reforms, but they will be ours … we have our
own way.”

At the moment the Ayrault government is sending out
positive signs on some issues: easing the policy regarding illegal immigrants,
some reforms of the justice system, fulfilling the election promise on pensions.
A modest increase in the minimum wage is in view, for the first time since
2006.

But on the central economic and social questions there
is not likely to be much movement before the second round of the parliamentary
elections on June 17. Hollande has ordered a report from the Cour des Comptes,
the national audit agency, which will conveniently arrive at the end of June,
after the elections. He has planned a “social summit” with employers and trade unions
for the beginning of July.

Pressures on Hollande

For the moment France’s European partners and the
markets are letting the Socialist Party get on with its election campaign. But
the honeymoon will not last, already there are rumblings. Assuming that
Hollande has a majority in parliament, he will in very short order be
confronted with the budget deficit and he will come under intense pressure from
European institutions and governments and from the markets. Last week, the
European Commission called on France to cut public spending and implement
structural reforms – we can safely assume it did not mean in France’s “own
way”. Simultaneously, Hollande will feel pressure from the unions and more
broadly from those who elected him. He will have to explain how he can reduce
the budget deficit without austerity policies. In a wider sense, he will have
to come out with something more concrete concerning the renegotiation of the
fiscal pact, and explain precisely what he means by growth. Because in the
present situation growth can mean relaunching the economy with a policy based
on demand, which implies increasing wages, public spending, progressive
taxation of personal and corporate wealth and reducing unemployment. Or it can
mean supply-side labour reforms to make it easier for employers to sack workers,
reduce employment rights and weaken collective bargaining. In other words, a
policy of “growth” based on cheapening of labour costs, with perhaps an easing
of austerity, but no letting up on reduction of the public sector, privatisation,
etc.

On June 5, hundreds of members of the main trade union
federation, the CGT, demonstrated in front of the regional government in the
southern city of Toulouse demanding “a real industrial policy”. The week before,
the CGT national leadership had given the government a list of 45 enterprises that
were either closing down or cutting back, with a potential loss of 45,000 jobs.
One of the most high-profile jobs in the Ayrault government went to Arnaud
Montebourg, a leader of the Socialist Party left, who was given the title of
minister for “redressement productif”, which can roughly be translated as
“rebuilding the productive economy”. Montebourg has announced that he will
“open firm discussions” with employers while predicting that he would “meet
with some failures”.

In fact Hollande will have to make some clear
decisions. In the present situation in Europe he does not have to undertake any
very radical reforms to provoke the ire of European political leaders and the
markets. He simply has to not do, or to do only slowly and reluctantly, what
they are telling him to do. It is quite unimaginable that a country as
important as France would be allowed to calmly pursues policies out of sync
with its partners. Pressure will come in the form of strong recommendations and
eventually financial fines from the European institutions. More importantly it
will come in the form of the markets raising the cost of government borrowing.

In the debates on the international level, Hollande
will have to take a position in the discussions over banking union and fiscal
union, on the attitude towards Greece and Spain, notably at the EU summit that
begins on June 28. None of the choices he has to make will become any easier in
a context of deepening crisis of the eurozone, with a real possibility of its break-up.

Looking at the record of the French Socialist Party
over the last 30 years and of social democracy in Portugal, Greece and Spain
over the last couple of years, it would be unwise to bet on Hollande resisting
the pressure of Europe and the markets. It is not however entirely ruled out
that he will try and do so to some extent and that at the head of such a key
country as France he will be able to find some room for manoeuvre. That would
be a further factor of instability in Europe.

Parliamentary elections

It would be futile to speculate on the outcome of the
parliamentary elections. For the moment the polls do point to a victory for the
left, but far from an overwhelming one and with the Socialist Party probably
dependent on the Greens and possibly the Left Front to have a majority. But it
is useful to look at the way the different political forces approach the elections.

For the Socialist Party the objective is quite clear:
to have a parliamentary majority, if possible without having to rely on the
Left Front. Sarkozy’s UMP aims ideally to win the elections, but failing that
to save as much as it can of its parliamentary group. But it is approaching
these elections in a state of latent crisis which can become more open and
sharper after June 17. Sarkozy’s withdrawal from the political scene, permanent
or not, opens the way for a war by different clans for control of the party,
the main contenders being the present general secretary Jean-Francois Cope and
ex-prime minister Francois Fillon, with former foreign minister (and prime minister
in the 1990s) Alain Juppe in the background.

Over and above personal rivalries, there is a
political choice to be made between the UMP remaining a mainstream centre-right
formation or becoming open to alliances with the far right. Assuming it loses
the elections there is no certainty that the party will remain united.

That is certainly the outcome sought for by Marine Le
Pen, who would like to reorganise the political spectrum by linking up with
sectors of the traditional right and would even be ready to abandon the
National Front name. She is in fact already conducting the FN’s parliamentary
campaign in the name of “Rassemblement Bleu Marine”, a play on her own name. To
carry out her strategy she needs to get a group of MPs elected – something the
FN has only ever done in 1986 when there was briefly a system of proportional representation.
(Le Pen herself is trying to get elected in a working-class constituency in northern
France – where Melenchon has also chosen to stand).

One sign to watch out for will be any deals after the
first round whereby the FN would support some UMP candidates in the second
round in return for reciprocal support to some of its own candidates. One of
the first cracks has just appeared, with a UMP candidate in the south of France
publicly offering to back the FN candidate in the second round if he gets more
votes in the first round, in exchange for a reciprocal promise from the FN.

The aim of the Left Front is to have as big a group of
MPs as possible, moving from less than 20 presently to 30, 40… and if possible
for a left majority to be dependent on its votes. The objective would be not to
set itself up in systematic opposition to Hollande, as the far left is already
announcing it will do, but to adopt a position of supporting measures that go
in the right direction and opposing others, a correct but not uncomplicated strategy.

In any case, given that Hollande will be caught
between the rock of international pressure and the hard place of the class
struggle in France, any strategy aimed at exerting pressure on the government
could not only be parliamentary but based on extra-parliamentary mobilisations.

As to the big question of whether the Left Front would
join a government under Hollande, for most of its components the answer seems
to be a clear no. As regards the Communist Party, a decision to participate in
government seems unlikely but not absolutely impossible. In any case the
decision will be taken very quickly after June 17.

Whether or not France has a left government, however
moderate, will be a factor in the European crisis. As will be the strength of
the Left Front and the role it is able to play. Increasingly, of course, what
happens in one country will influence and be influenced by events elsewhere.
That goes especially for the radical left. So on the evening of June 17, all
eyes on the French left will not only be on the election results in France.
They will also be watching Athens.

[Murray Smith is a member of the anti-capitalist party Dei Lenk (The Left) in Luxembourg. This is a slightly amended English version of an
article written for the Danish web magazine KritiskDebat.]